


red sky at night

by sweetwatersong



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Black Jewels Fusion, F/M, Infinity Gems, Thor: The Dark World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-12
Updated: 2015-05-12
Packaged: 2018-03-30 06:30:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3926389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetwatersong/pseuds/sweetwatersong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In bare fields among yellowing wheat stalks, the sun sinking low in the sky, the fate of the Territory would be decided. Malekith had the Aether, the Midgardians had no Queen, and Jane - Jane had the truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	red sky at night

**Author's Note:**

> Playing fast and loose with the Black Jewels rules here. Enjoy!
> 
> Warnings for references to a past, canonical character death, a self-inflicted injury, and blood.

The Aether’s pressure built and built and _built_ against the edges of Jane’s senses, in the corners of her mind. The same feeling had once prickled across her skin on a summer evening when she stood in the tall grass as her skirts and the stalks rattled in an ominous wind. How that wind had howled, curling around her and racing back to the storm darkening the horizon; how it had twisted and curved, touching down amongst the wheat fields and the farming houses. Jane had watched it dance in wild abandon, watched it roar over empty ground and naked trees until its fury took it beyond her sight. She had traced its path the next morning, a clear blue sky above, and found only devastation in its wake.

And none of the Blood around her sensed the coming storm yet.

Maybe that would be her saving grace. Males thought in webs of power, in up and down and verticals. They had never learned to look beyond the edges of their webs, to look in horizontals. They had never learned to think out.

Jane drew a breath against the weight on her mind and tried to make at least one Prince see.

“You don’t understand. The Aether was here before the Blood appeared, before the land even existed. Thor, it remembers a time without us. It remembers the Darkness. Malekith’s taking all that to mean it wants a return to that time. He thinks it wants our destruction, our sacrifice, but he’s wrong.”

In the empty fields around them the Midgardian Blood – what few of them remained - prepared for a final stand. It was whispered that pillars of smoke still rose from the fields and forests where Malekith had devastated their Territory in a handful of days. The destruction had occurred so quickly that reinforcements from the other Territories had yet to arrive.

If they were coming at all.

Knowing the power that Malekith now commanded, Jane would not be surprised if the other Territory Queens had chosen to strengthen their own lands over providing a crippled ally aid. Who could halt such tremendous power? And yet Midgard’s forces did stand a chance of stopping it if she was correct. If she could convince Thor.

“Whether he is or not, Jane, he stills wields the Aether and our position here is precarious. His forces advance even now, threatening this place.” Thor did not believe that a cause could be lost, for which Jane was unendingly grateful. Without his protection on behalf of the Territory Queen she would have been doomed the moment the Aether had entered her possession. Yet the fatalistic undercurrent of Midgard’s last defenders ran in his eyes even now, as he took her hand and held it with a tightness borne of desperation.

“Please, Jane. Take Darcy, go with Happy. He will bring you on the Winds to a safer place, to one that is not in Malekith’s path. We will all fight even should we become demon-dead, but if he overruns us, if all should be forsaken…”

Jane ached for him, for the heartbreak that showed through his focus. It was not hard to realize his thoughts turned to the Queen of this Territory, to his mother, and all that had befallen her at Malekith’s hands. She tightened her fingers on his to reassure him that she was still here, that she was still standing. She had not fallen. She would not fall.

Jane knew the truth. That had to be enough.

The echoes of Thor’s sorrow eased at last, though they were not vanquished. He took a breath and the breastplate of his armor bumped lightly against her knuckles, cool and smooth. “I would die before I would see you hurt, but I cannot risk that. Jane, you must leave.”

And in that moment all her empathy turned to incredulity. Had he not listened to her? Yet in his expression she found nothing but fear and determination.

“I should have known,” Jane said finally. She loosened her grip on Thor’s hand as his eyes fixed on her, bright and clear and the blue of an autumn sky before the night. “Your sex always forgets that the start of it all, the heart of it all, lies with mine.”

“Jane,” the Prince began. She shook her head to forestall his arguments and kissed him lightly, leaning forward for the barest brush of their lips. He could not look back for her, could not turn his attention to what she planned to do. As if Malekith had been listening to her thoughts, the first sentry alarms sounded when they drew apart.

“I’ll find Darcy. Whatever happens, Thor?” Jane cupped his face with her free hand, trying a final time to make him understand. “Don’t stop fighting.”

“I can promise you that.” He tried to smile through the grief and killing edge, and very nearly managed it. “May the Darkness be merciful.”

“It will.” She would make sure of that.

With that Jane drew her hand from his and watched, her feet pressed into the barren ground, as Thor turned and headed for the western fields.

He did not look back.

Around her more warriors streamed towards the imminent battle with half-drained Jewels swinging from their necks, gleaming on their fingers. They paid the nondescript witch in the dust little attention. All the better for Jane, for her body could not move while her mind ached under the Aether’s pressure. It unfurled like a storm inside her senses, an edge to the psychic touch that confirmed Malekith’s assault would soon start. The Aether’s heavy power would began rising now through the darkest Jewels now, swamping them with doubt and fear. She wondered distantly if Thor felt it yet, anchored as he was to the Ebon-gray. Had it inspired terror in him, or the desire to fight it, to protect his lands? But he could not protect them; none of the males bracing themselves for the battle could.

Not so of Jane.

Her free hand went to the knife against her thigh even as she tried to find a center in the psychic tumult, a name ready on her lips. Malekith’s rage would soon be here in truth as well as threat, and there was but one chance to stop it. But before she could call out, Darcy, faithful and constant Darcy, appeared before her. There was a golden chalice between the Priestess’ curled fingers and a hope on her own red lips. The other witch knew as no one else did what Jane planned next. Knew, and believed.

“Ready?”

Jane smiled then, for the tremor in Darcy’s voice and the steadiness of her hands.

“Thank you.”

Then, in a race against the inevitable, the inexorable, she pulled the knife from its sheath and drew it across her palm, holding her hand over the chalice in a silent prayer to the Darkness.

Plink. Plink. Plinkplinkplinkplink…

A circle of red grew and reflected back at her from within the chalice’s shallow cup. Far beyond her, Red spreading across the horizon like a summer storm from her memory, the Aether rolled towards the Midgardian encampment. Without looking away from the chalice, without a word to the hollow winds around her, Jane threw a gleaming shield over the fields shorn of their harvest.

Opal crashed into Red.

It should have crushed her. It should have outright killed her. It should have been impossible for her to hold the monstrous attack off, and yet Jane did. As mighty as Malekith’s vengeance was, as much as it strove to bend her knees and throw her to the fallow earth, the Aether could go no further than the boundaries of her shield. Thor might be the thunder and lightning, his brother the wicked winds, but she – she was the storm.

Opal met Red, and held.

Somewhere, caught in the midst of directing his men and wielding the blood-red Jewel, Malekith screamed.

Jane could not tell if her lips curved in a victorious smile or not. It did not matter. They had drunk from the same cup, he and she, Warlord and witch; she knew him now as thoroughly as she knew herself, her own wants and dreams. Like so many others in years beyond count Malekith had named the Aether a Jewel, strange and liquid though it might have begun. To make it bow to his will he had forced it into a crystalline shape, into known boundaries, and he truly believed what he professed.

But she knew the truth of it, and it gave her hope.

At Malekith’s command the Aether surged forward again to send her Opal shield billowing and flexing with its attack. People shouted distantly, far off through the crackling haze now wrapped around her. She knew distantly that the voices belonged to those she cared about, those she loved, but with all her mind intent on the balance playing out before her Jane could not spare a thought to wonder who they were.

Without warning Ebon-gray surged up under her shield, electric and furious, unable to gain purchase in the seething ripples of the Aether; Sapphire followed it, and more Jewels flashed under the protection of her dome. But there was no time for more. She could not feel them in the webs, deep as they were. She had no way of knowing if any of them understood now. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.

Other waves of Jeweled power washed by her and became nothing more than faint hints of static in the raging tide pouring around her shoulders. Removed from it all, Jane gritted her teeth and pushed back against the crashing Aether, the muscles along her back and arms taut with an effort as much physical as psychic. Her lungs screamed when her breath caught and held, held, held –

She knew the truth: the Aether was no Jewel.

The Aether was no Jewel, and Jane was no Queen.

She was not a Queen, bound to the land’s health and wealth, nor a Black Widow, to spin webs of the future and draw poison from a man’s lips. She was not even a Priestess as Darcy was, with covenants and passages to oversee. But Jane was a witch, and this land was hers. Down to her bones, down to her soul, Jane belonged to this land. By Birthright and Blood rites, she was a part of it.

With her blood and will, she would protect it.

The ghost of the Darkness that once coiled around her bones and nested in her veins now washed through the sky, over the gleaming lights in her shield – and assented.

Someone’s calloused hands caught her elbow, her side, lowered her down to the dry soil when her legs collapsed underneath her. Against the brilliant blue dome of Sapphire power above her Darcy leaned forward, an unfocused shape.

“From the Darkness we are born,” the Priestess said as she held the chalice before her.

Dazed, Jane lifted her hands to the golden stem.

“And to the Darkness we return,” she replied unevenly. Her fingers drew the chalice from Darcy’s and brought it down, tipped it towards the barren ground waiting under her knees. Inside the cup the red, red liquid gleamed with more than a witch’s blood. “May the Darkness be merciful.”

She poured the mixed Aether and blood out into the lands that had welcomed them, into the gentle earth’s embrace. It spilled out – and curved over the rim to find her touch.

Contact.

The Aether flowed up over her hands, exploring the contours of her lifelines and tendons with a smoothness that belied the fact that gravity should have drawn it down. Snaking around her fingers like filigree, like armor and jewelry fused into one, it shifted and changed as she offered all she had to the Darkness.

For a moment, only a moment, the ghost of that Darkness shone Red in the light of a dying day – and vanished.

Jane sagged abruptly into the support of the hands that caught her. All the strings and urgency that held her up had been cut with that separation, with that parting. Darcy took the empty chalice from Jane’s open hands and vanished it, fumbling in her satchel for a handful of hastily prepared bandages. Behind Jane the man holding her had dropped to his knees to allow her to lean into him, the breastplate of his armor cold against her cheek. Her fight was over. Now it remained to the warriors to do what she could not. From the battlefield screams and clashing weapons carried to the bare field they rested in, the sounds still faint through her dizziness, and distant bursts of power glittered in macabre rainbows. Green, Red, Purple Dusk and Summer-sky…

“Jane,” Thor murmured in a ragged voice, his lips pressed into her hair. “What have you done? The Aether - it is gone.”

She attempted to coax her words into forming, but even the thought took too great an effort. Her limbs felt heavy and conversely oddly weightless, as if her bones had been removed and hollow spaces left in their places. Yet blood splashed onto the white bandages Darcy began to wind around her hand, as red and real as it ever had been, and Jane watched it from the corner of her eye. Had anyone else had realized what happened?

Had anyone else understood?

As the sun slid towards the horizon Jane felt the threads of the Aether flow through the chambers of her heart – and take up its home.

*

This was a truth: Malekith’s forces were scattered to the corners of the Winds, hunted by every Territory within reach. Malekith himself died with an Ebon-gray blast, mind and body turned to mere whispers in the Darkness.

This was a truth: Midgard rebuilt. Sif rose with Frigga’s bereaved court to become Territory Queen, and the Blood returned to places razed by fire and Jeweled power. Crops planted in fields once stained with blood grew, and flourished, and thrived. Midgard did as well.

This was a truth: Jane remained by Thor’s side, becoming witch and wife to the Prince, and helped to draw her land back together a bit at a time.

This was the truth: Sometimes, when the setting sun hit her Opal pendant just so, it gleamed a hearts-blood Red.


End file.
